The advertising market generates approximately a hundred billion dollars a year in America alone and is a huge force within the global economy. Without advertising, manufacturers and service providers would not be able to make themselves known to the public. In a competitive and advanced marketplace advertising plays a central role in helping new products penetrate the market as well building trust between a client and a specific product or service.
Television advertising as a media has created some legendary commercials. In the 1980's, during the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh computer with a 60-second Orwellian epic commercial called “1984.” The spot cost $400,000 to produce and $500,000 to broadcast in its single national paid airing. The commercial turned the Super Bowl into a major ad event and began an era of advertising as news. Television advertising reached an all-time high in the 1990s with infomercials, huge mergers and ambush marketing.
In recent years there has been a major change in the internal division of media types open to advertisers, as advertising on the Internet is growing and accelerating, while older media such as printed newspapers and radio are fading.
Internet Advertising
The growth of Internet advertising since its 1994 birth has been truly phenomenal What started out with banners, as bland and common as roadside billboards has exploded into a rich-media interactive environment that may soon rival the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. In the 1990's online advertising was born when HotWired signed up fourteen advertisers for its online debut. The following year saw the emergence and public acceptance of the Web as an interactive medium. Both United Airlines and Maytag introduced their Websites and promoted them through banners. By 1996, advertisers were promoting Websites using traditional media.
Now, online advertising is a world of rich media. Banners pop up into their own browser windows, advertisements appear on screen before the page is finished downloading and advertising interrupts online games and other interactions. Images are beginning to resemble television commercials. Online advertising is quickly becoming more diverse as sites cater to more traditional advertisers' and search for ways to better meet advertisers needs.
Forecasts for the future of Internet advertising are positive, and researchers are in agreement that advertising on the Internet will only grow and expand in the coming years. An outstanding trend, as supported by research, is the development of video advertising on the Internet. Early Internet advertising is based on banners and text announcements, but in the future the weight of video Internet advertising will grow and its reach will widen. As of today, there are four major types of video Internet advertising:
1. Pre-Roll Video Ads—Advertising that appears before the beginning of video content that a user is watching.
2. Mid-Roll Video Ads—Advertising that appears during the video content that a user is watching
3. Post-Roll Video Ads—Advertising that appears after the video content that a user is watching
4. In Banner Video Ads—Advertising videos that are integrated in the Web page. Such an ad is usually shown as a static slide picture that is taken from a video advertisement with a special mark, usually a triangle that shows PLAY. Clicking on the slide makes the advertisement start playing.
In-banner ads run as part of Web page content within a box on a Web page. Transitional ads appear between page displays, where the only content is the ad. Pre-roll ads run prior to user-requested video content as part of the same stream. See prior art FIG. 1a, Consumers select which content to view, providing advertisers with a highly captive, self-targeted audience. Companion banners complement the pre-roll spot, enabling consumers to click to learn more. Pre-roll advertising is the fastest-growing video format, thanks to its integration with user-requested content and similarities to television. See prior art FIG. 1b, reference block. Because of its impact and accountability, pre-roll video is in high demand, but supply is limited and execution is complex.
The most effective and TV-like form of online video advertising is found in the pre-roll format, but inventory is limited because of the limited amount of content publishers offer. Pre-roll tends to be more effective than banner. Therefore, frequency capping is needed most for pre-roll, which is the most effective form of online video, and also has the least inventory. Video production costs are still extremely high. An advertiser seeking scale has to send ten beta tapes to ten Web sites and have each encoded in different player formats. More coordination is needed on the publisher side.
One might be led to believe that streaming video commercials are the next “big thing.” As broadband gradually replaces dial-up, it becomes possible for online users to receive video commercials with sound and motion quality equal to television. One of the mistakes of the past is to assume that content from traditional media could be repurposed for the Web. That might have worked for recipes and baseball scores, but it didn't for news stories (which are now shorter and full of hotlinks). Magazine ad pages didn't translate to the Web successfully and neither will 30-second TV spots. TiVo and Replay TV notwithstanding, TV spots are made knowing that the audience is essentially passive and in many cases, downright inert. The audience hardly even picks up the phone and dials an 800 number anymore (unless it is to vote off a singer or a comic). There is no interaction with the ad, so it tends to be loud and convey a brand “feeling,” rather than a product attribute. By the third or fourth exposure, you might start to remember the product name. Advertisers still have faith that the 30-second spot moves product off shelves.
But online, consumers are anything but passive. They are actively engaged in the medium and have the power to stop a video spot in a heartbeat. The idea that users idly “surf’ the ‘Net is a myth of bygone days. People go to the Internet with a purpose and infrequently go beyond their bookmarked sites. While this engagement with the medium means people are paying attention (and are poised to take advantage of the Internet's unique interactivity), it also means they are somewhat impatient. They will not sit still for 30 seconds of sight sound and motion.
However, for a Web ad 10-60 seconds is about right. It is enough time to engage the viewer then hand them off to a static Website or e-commerce shop, or the chance to play a longer video of their choosing. Everything in our lives has been time compressed and we have developed a shorter attention span. Just behind us is the MTV generation which can multi-task and will probably only see commercials in the context of five others things they are doing at the same moment. To that and still younger generations, 30 seconds of anything (unless they really like it) is an eternity.
A whole new industry will grow up around the creation of 10-60 second Internet streaming video commercials. But since it will be able to deliver a very short brand message, it will have to be inexorably linked to the interactivity of the Web in order to provide users who really want to engage, the additional information they want. The creative approach will have to be unlike anything on TV now, and there will have to a seamless transition to other Web resources. Implemented effectively, 10-60 second spots will pull in-market buyers to a place where retailers, dealers or even manufacturers know they have a hot prospect and can shorten the buying cycle. Pre-roll ads are under 15 seconds to avoid annoying the viewer and are custom created by the client or a creative team. Either way, they enhance brand image and message with high quality video content that plays to a Web savvy and educated demographic.
Video ads combine television's sight, sound and motion with the Internet's immediacy and accountability to reach and engage online audiences. Plus, online video overcomes the challenges that can accompany TV-including the increased use of digital video recorders (DVR's) and ad-skipping technologies.
Google, which began to be active in the marketplace only in the last years, changed the “rules of the game” of Internet advertising when it started to offer advertising based on search results. The company has succeeded in creating a new advertising market, and today it rules this market without opposition.
The advantage of Google is that it succeeded in providing a precise placement system for online advertising that was easy for advertisers to generate, available immediately and offered advertisers a campaign that is targeted for a well-defined population, whether based on geographic location or demographic profile. Google makes it possible to run a campaign without requiring a minimal budget and that opens the Internet advertising market to a wide range of small advertisers that previously did not have access to it. Before Google entered, campaigns were manually executed by advertising account managers who were not interested in accommodating small budgets. Google also brought a media advantage to the market. Google campaigns are directly executed by the advertisers enabled to control and change its definitions at any given moment. Before Google campaign change necessitated intervention of the advertising company's representative and therefore the nature of change was slow and infrequent. Google makes it possible for advertisers to change the definitions of their campaigns in real time and thus achieve better results.
Video advertising on the Internet is still not widely used, mainly because of the high production price involved. Even though it is possible to run low budget campaigns, production costs are what prevent small companies from using this option.
Television Advertising
As indicated previously, advertising on television is a vast industry that brings in approximately seventy billion dollars a year. The majority of advertising budgets are found in the hands of big companies that invest enormous sums in the production of commercials and broadcasts. The cost of production of a television advertisement ranges to hundreds of thousands of dollars, where even the most economical productions range to the tens of thousands of dollars. Additionally, some production budgets can range well into the millions of dollars. Television advertising is the accepted way for advertisers to create awareness and loyalty to their brand, and it is agreed that television is the most effective medium through which to emotionally involve viewers in a product or service. In light of the high production cost, few small businesses use television as an advertising platform.
Naturally, not all advertising broadcast time on TV is used to its fullest advantage. To be sure, if a potential advertising slot is not sold to an advertiser, once the time of the slot passes it expires and thus the broadcasting station cannot profit from it anymore. This creates a time limit on the viability of each advertising minute on TV. Within that, there are a lot of advertising minutes that could be sold at a price that would be affordable to small businesses; however selling these “unused” time slots poses two challenges:
One challenge is the production cost of the advertisement that stands at tens of thousands of dollars;
The second challenge—before Google, the treatment and selling of broadcast time on the Internet was done manually and therefore there was no financial justification for low budget businesses to be involved.
Production Cost
Google, the cable companies, and additional bodies, have already declared their intentions to develop an automatic system that will enable buying and creating of television advertisements, in a manner that will open the market to small advertisers as well. Here too, the central problem remains the production cost of the advertisement itself.
The prior art provides four ways for the advertiser to acquire a video advertisement that would remain in its possession during a campaign:
1. Hiring a production company that would produce and film the ad for the company. In this type of production, many professional personnel are involved—screenwriters, filmmakers, narrators, recording artists, actors and editors—and therefore a quality production would not succeed without a budget of tens of thousands of dollars.
2. Developing a production that is based on video library material only. In this case, the process itself would be complicated because it requires a search in a number of different libraries to find video clips, voice and effects. This requires hiring professional personnel that would execute the search. It is a complicated process to be the middleman between the production and the client because the latter cannot be involved in the creation process itself, but will only receive the finalized product. If the client wants to participate in the production process, the time of the production would lengthen, and the price would rise.
3. Purchasing from companies that offer half ready made templates. The client is invited to choose the template that fits a specific advertiser. This method has two central disadvantages.
First, the production process is limited in its ability to involve the advertiser; and
Second, there are limited templates to choose from because they were prepared by company employees whose job it is to create templates.
4. Filming the advertisement based on self-production alone. In this case, the cost of production would be very low, however the quality of the final result is uncertain.
US Pat Applic. No. 20070156524, Systems and Methods for Content Customization, by Grouf, et al, discloses methods and systems for providing customized advertisements, and hereinafter is referred to as the “Spot Runner” application. The method, for example, including storing a set of templates of components of advertisements, the templates defining a set of media objects; receiving, over a computer network, information related to an advertiser; based on the information related to the advertiser, presenting to the advertiser, over the computer network, a list of a subset of the set of templates of at least components of advertisements; receiving from the advertiser a selection of a template from the list of the subset of the set of templates; playing the template that the advertiser selected, without custom information from the advertiser; prompting the advertiser to provide input to create a customized advertisement based on the selected template; and creating a customized advertisement from the selected template and the input provided by the advertiser. The method may include using an edit decision list to represent organization of objects in templates.
Thus it would be advantageous to have an improved system and method for economical, user-friendly, user-empowered interactive production of a vast library of 10-60 second Internet and Television commercials.